For the people

Sunday

Oct 15, 2006 at 12:01 AMFeb 28, 2007 at 1:03 PM

Joseph R. LaPlante

FALL RIVER — Their names — Manuel Rodrigues Machado and Manuel Tavares Oliveira, Attorney Francis J. Carreiro, and John Rodrigues Machado, brother to Manuel — have faded like sepia-toned photographs. But the four men, all Portuguese immigrants, were political pioneers in the 1920s and 1930s. Manuel Rodrigues Machado and Mr. Tavares Oliveira were the first Portuguese residents appointed to a city position in Fall River: Board of Welfare in 1928. Attorney Carreiro was the first Portuguese resident to win a seat on the School Committee in 1926. John Machado was the first Portuguese immigrant elected to the City Council, serving from 1930 to 1936. And, in Fairhaven, Walter Silveira Sr. in 1942 won the first of three consecutive one-year terms as town auditor, before being elected to an unexpired term as the town's first selectman of Portuguese descent in the 1944 special election. He held that seat continuously until his death at 86 in 1988. That is where Portuguese involvement in politics took serious root in Southeastern Massachusetts, providing the seedlings of civic involvement that have grown into a forest of Portuguese-Americans elected in this region to City Council seats, boards of selectmen, school committees, as mayor and district attorney and to a host of county offices and seats in the state House and Senate. But politics for the Portuguese has evolved as a different pursuit than it did for other immigrant groups, notably the Irish and the Italians, who relatively quickly established power bases that produced jobs and influence. The Portuguese seem to seek office only to fulfill an obligation pressed upon any ethnic group that constitutes nearly 50 percent of the population in some sections of the region. "The Portuguese have never had common causes here," said Professor Onésimo Almeida, chairman of the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University in Providence. "There is no common agenda for the Portuguese to unite and have leaders." History, faith and culture consign politics to a lower rung of interest for the Portuguese on the ladder to success than for other groups, numerous studies have reported. "Don't call attention to yourself, be self-effacing," said Professor Almeida, himself an emigre from São Miguel in the 1970s. "In 500 years of Azorean history there was never an election. That is 500 years of people learning that only God could help you. The government was in Lisbon, so far away. They couldn't help you." Even the dictatorship of Salazar that controlled the country and its colonies from the 1930s until the revolution in the 1970s reinforced the order of priority. Salazar proclaimed the triune Deus (God), Pátria (Country), e Família (Family). Trusting the family over outsiders was the creed for the family of Frances Gracia of Fall River, a retired teacher and researcher/writer of Portuguese history. Her family settled in Little Compton in Rhode Island and owned farmland there. "They were farming people," she said. "The Yankees went to Town Hall to solve their problems. My family knew the only way to survive is family ties. They knew government couldn't take care of you." At one point the Republican "Yankees" attempted to enlist her grandfather, John Sylvia, a respected leader of the Portuguese community, in the hope he could swing a bloc of Portuguese votes to their candidates. In exchange for his help, the Republicans promised to appoint him highway surveyor, Ms. Gracia recalled. He delivered the votes, but the Republicans reneged on their end of the bargain, she said. "My grandfather came home and said, 'From now on we are Democrats,' " she said. The Portuguese compose a sizeable voting bloc, according to "Portuguese-Americans and Contemporary Civic Culture in Massachusetts," in the Portuguese in America Series, edited by Clyde Barrow, director of the UMass Dartmouth Center for Policy Analysis. Professor Barrow found that 85.9 percent of the Portuguese-Americans polled in his 2002 study are registered voters. And, the Portuguese exercise that right, with 54.5 percent of those questioned in the study reporting they "always vote," compared to 37.9 percent of the voters of non-Portuguese descent. That turnout has produced several political highwater marks for the Portuguese, including the legendary late Sen. Mary Fonseca, a Democrat from Fall River, former longtime Fall River Mayor Carlton M. Viveiros and the peripatetic George Rogers of New Bedford. Mrs. Fonseca was the first woman of Portuguese-American descent to be elected a state senator, and the first woman to hold a leadership position in the state Senate. From 1973 to 1984 she held the position of first assistant majority leader. Her career was filled with historic accomplishments, beginning in 1953 when she was only the second woman elected to the Massachusetts Senate, later when she was elected the first woman to serve as assistant majority whip, to her years as chairman of the powerful Committee on Education and finally as the assistant majority leader. Mrs. Fonseca, who rubbed elbows with political luminaries from the State House to the White House, was an early and unwavering supporter of establishing what would become the University of Massachusetts campus in Dartmouth and was a strong advocate of funding for public education, from elementary school through college. Mr. Viveiros was the face of the new Fall River. He took office in 1978 and led the city until 1990, ushering major development projects and strengthening government operations. Mr. Viveiros burst upon the political scene as a youthful state representative in 1970 and held the 5th Bristol District seat until 1978 when he ran for mayor. In 1990, he resigned as mayor to accept the appointment as Clerk Magistrate of Southeastern Massachusetts Housing Court. Mr. Rogers' political career stretches back to 1964, when the then-English teacher and track coach at Greater New Bedford Voc-Tech "came from nowhere" to capture a state representative seat. After six years in the Statehouse, Mr. Rogers stepped down to run for mayor. He won, and was mayor from 1970-71, a tumultuous time when race riots were tearing at the fabric of the city. Mr. Rogers still stands as the only Portuguese-American to hold the mayoralty of New Bedford. After he was defeated in his bid for re-election by John Markey, he launched into a campaign for a state Senate seat held by George G. Mendonça. He lost the Democratic primary. Undeterred, Mr. Rogers won an at-large seat on the City Council in 1973. It was the first of many political comebacks. In 1974, he won the state Senate seat held by Mr. Mendonça, and was the area's senator for four years. But 1978 was not kind to Mr. Rogers. In a huge state investigation of misuse of state vocational school funds, Mr. Rogers was convicted of taking a $5,000 bribe and of accepting another $10,000 that was used to pay the salary of two of his legislative aides. He was the first state senator to ever be convicted of a felony while in office. Sentenced to two years in the Barnstable House of Correction, Mr. Rogers campaigned for re-election to his Senate seat from jail, losing in the Democratic primary. He served 10 months. Within months of his release in 1979, he won back a spot on the City Council. In 1984, he launched a bid to return to the state representative seat he left in 1969 to run for mayor, but he lost to Joseph P. McIntyre in the Democratic primary. Every two years, though, like clockwork, New Bedford voters would return him to the City Council. It was a string of a dozen victories. He served 23 years on the City Council in all. In 1998, he launched another political comeback, this time to the state Legislature that he left in 1978. He won the Democratic primary for state representative by 27 votes over Christopher Saunders, who was one of the first opponents to bring up Mr. Rogers' felony convictions during the campaign. After a 21-year hiatus from Beacon Hill, Mr. Rogers had returned. "It's like deja vu all over again," Mr. Rogers commented at the time. But with an aging support base, Mr. Rogers faced an uphill battle for re-election. His state representative district was redrawn to include much more of the suburbs, and he lost his seat to Mark Howland of Freetown in 2002. He subsequently ran for City Council and lost. If the political victories of Mrs. Fonseca, Mr. Viveiros and Mr. Rogers signified the apex of Portuguese political accomplishment, then the 1995 city election in Fall River was the nadir, because in a city with a majority Portuguese population, voters turned out the five Portuguese City Council members, who had held a majority for one two-year term. In the election, only one of 17 Portuguese candidates for office won. Forty years earlier in the neighboring town of Westport, Portuguese and French-Canadian immigrants concluded that they could not, as separate groups, unseat the powerbroker "Yankees" in town government, said sociologist Dr. Glória Mulcahy, who has studied the minutes of the Portuguese American Civic League in preparation of a book she is writing with Dr. Antone C. Vieira about Portuguese pioneers of Westport. "The leaders of the Portuguese American Civic League came together with the French-Canadians to talk about taking political charge of the town, but they couldn't agree on who should run for selectman, a Portuguese candidate or French-Canadian candidate, so they never banded together," she said. Today, a new generation of Portuguese-Americans is emerging on the political scene. They see political activity tied to academic advancement, said New Bedford City Councilor Débora Coelho, 39, who charged into a first term as an at-large member from the ranks of neighborhood activists. "Our parents had the mills," said Mrs. Coelho, whose family came to America from São Miguel in 1972 when she was 5. "They came here to work. Their American dream was fulfilled at that level and they succeeded. "We came along and we can't get our dreams fulfilled in the mills, the mills aren't even here anymore. We have to compete to advance and we have to be involved in politics and education to do that." Beginning to disappear is the once prevalent attitude among Portuguese immigrant families that "your kids are worth a paycheck," Mrs. Coelho said. "A lot of the older kids had to quit school to help out their families to survive financially." "Twenty years ago, those kids had no choice. Unfortunately, it still exists, although at a lesser degree." Emerging among Portuguese-Americans is the recognition that civic involvement can lead a people to better lives, she said. "It took a couple of generations for us to figure it out," she said. "In our culture we were never encouraged to be a part of the government. A lot of us came here to get away from our government. "But, today our kids are graduating from high school and going to college and leading successful lives. I don't think that happens without getting involved in politics; providing role models, getting people interested in the community, in what's happening around them. Becoming American."

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